Interaction Design

I designed a prototype to support the practice of citizen science that focused on animal census in the urban community. I chose to create an app that was specifically aimed towards pet owners. My app, Pawesome Health, can be used to not only enter data about someone’s pet, but also provides health tips for pet owners and allows pet owners to look at other data that has been entered and compare their pets health to the health of pets of the same breed. After completing my prototype I showed it to a few of my friends who are pet owners so I could see how they would interact with it. I received good feedback about the ease of navigating the app.

The biggest problem I had in the design process was figuring out how to narrow down the information I wanted to incorporate into the app. I considered what the essential services of the app were and what it needed in order to have repeat users. Although I thought of many different ideas of what the app could potentially be capable of I cut out a lot of those ideas in order to make the app simple and easy to use.

I liked that although there was an overall theme for the project — creating an app for citizen science related to animal census in the urban community — I was still given a lot of freedom in my creation of the app. I enjoy being given some instruction but not so much that my creativity was restricted. I also thought using the POP app was a very helpful learning experience and allowed me to see my ideas come to life.